


lost souls and reverie

by glorious_spoon



Series: lost souls and reverie [1]
Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Dubious Consent, First Kiss, First Time, Fuck Or Die, M/M, Misunderstandings, Morning After, Podfic Available, Sex Pollen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:54:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,830
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22286689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: Geralt and Jaskier come across a creature that stalks men and turns them mad with lust. Geralt is immune; Jaskier isn't.It complicates things afterwards.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Series: lost souls and reverie [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623832
Comments: 119
Kudos: 2412





	lost souls and reverie

Jaskier wakes slowly, with a bruised and feverish feeling like he’s coming out of a long illness. He’s been stripped to his smallclothes and cocooned in wool blankets and from somewhere not far off there’s the sound of footsteps, clattering, soft cursing in a low voice that even his semi-conscious mind recognizes as Geralt’s.

It’s dark and his nose is full of the scent of wood smoke and wet sheep—likely from the blankets—and something that smells encouragingly like food. That’s as much as he can ascertain with his eyes shut, so he opens them.

They’re inside a small cabin, all rough wood and mud daub, the shutters drawn against the night. There’s a fire burning in the hearth, flooding the room with warmth and a dull reddish light that illuminates Geralt’s sharp profile as he breaks a handful of sticks over his knee and feeds them into the flames. He’s stripped to the waist, his hair loose and tangled around his shoulders. It’s a pleasant sight to wake up to, and for several minutes Jaskier just blinks at him sleepily, enjoying the opportunity to stare without getting something thrown at him.

So. He’s been taken ill, and Geralt is caring for him. That’s… unexpected, though not as unexpected as it once might have been. Geralt’s decent streak is never quite as deeply buried as he likes to pretend.

What is unexpected is that he’s here at all. The last thing Jaskier remembers is a (stunning, if he does say so himself, and he does) performance at Wolford Keep's harvest feast. He must have met Geralt on the road between there and wherever in the nine hells _here_ is, but he has no memory of that, or of anything that came after. It’s unnerving, although at least a quick inventory suggests that he’s still got all his appendages attached. He’s entirely intact, if sore and tired and unpleasantly sticky with dried sweat.

And, as he discovers when he tries to squirm out of the blankets, wrapped up as tightly as a fly in a spider’s larder. He twists, trying to dislodge them, and must make some noise that alerts Geralt, because a moment later the witcher is kneeling before him and gripping his chin with one rough hand, turning Jaskier’s face toward the light. His brow is furrowed, but he looks more worried than angry as he peers into Jaskier’s eyes, then presses a hand briefly to his brow as though checking for a fever.

“I’m not actually a child,” Jaskier says, but he doesn’t protest this treatment overmuch. Geralt has the worn and weary air of someone who’s been up fretting for too many nights, but he relaxes visibly when Jaskier speaks. It’s flattering, actually, not that he’d ever admit as much.

“Fever’s broken,” Geralt says finally, sitting back on his heels. His lower lip is reddened, as though he’s been chewing at it. His pale skin gleams in the firelight, bruises showing through the stubble on his throat. “What do you remember?”

“Ah. Not much? I was taken ill, I suppose.”

Geralt’s face does something odd that Jaskier can’t interpret. He straightens, stepping away and turning back toward the fire. “Hm.”

Jaskier wrestles the rest of the way out of the blankets and peers at the back of Geralt’s head, his stiff shoulders, and then says, slowly, “Geralt, what are you not telling me? What happened?”

There’s silence for a moment, then Geralt heaves a sigh. “We met on the road outside of Wolford. You insisted on accompanying me to Hollyhead to deal with a pori that’s been stalking the villagers there. Camped too close to its nest, and it came upon us in the night. We made it as far as this cabin before, well.”

He stops abruptly.

“A pori.” Jaskier squints at him. “Wait. I think know that one.”

He does, he realizes with a sinking feeling like his heart is trying to migrate somewhere to the vicinity of his toenails. A beast that stalks men and turns them mad with lust, afflicts them with a fever that will burn them to death unless they slake it. It’s an excellent subject for a certain type of ballad, maudlin and pornographic and best sung in locales where it’s unlikely to be overheard by anyone with a delicate temperament.

As far as reality goes, though… He swallows. “I thought you were immune to that sort of magic.”

“I am. You’re not.” Geralt leans over the fire, ladling something from the pot hung over it into a mug and allowing ample time for the full horror of that statement to percolate into Jaskier’s brain before he turns back around. “Here. Drink this.”

“What…” he trails off as Geralt shoves the mug into his hands. It’s hot on his palms and steaming, and he can even see bits of meat and vegetable in it. Small bits, but that’s still a nigh-unparalleled luxury as far as Geralt’s cooking is concerned. “Ah. Thank you. What happened, then?”

Geralt lets out an aggravated breath through his nose. “What the fuck do you think, Jaskier?”

His tangled hair and reddened mouth. The bruises on his throat look more like something made by a rough lover than by monsters or weapons, and there are thin raised welts on his bare shoulders like someone has been clawing at him. They’re already faded; likely they’ll be gone by morning. Geralt heals quickly. They must be fresh.

It still takes several agonizing moments to make the obvious connection.

“Oh,” Jaskier says, blinking, and then, standing clumsily, blankets sliding down from his shoulders and knees all a-wobble, “ _Ohhh_ , oh dear sweet—you must be joking.”

A log pops in the fireplace, sending a shower of coals rolling out onto the hearth. Geralt goes to scrape them back into the fire, casting a glare over his shoulder. The shadows and the scowl carve his normally quite forbidding countenance into a downright terrifying sight. “Sit down, shut up, and eat. We’re done talking about this.”

“Oh, I am nowhere _near_ done talking about this,” Jaskier says, briskly fanning the flames of his outrage and ignoring the tight miserable lump in the pit of his stomach that might be shame or disappointment or some poisonous mixture of both.

“I am,” Geralt snaps, and bends to drag a shirt out of his open pack and yank it on, further disarranging his already disheveled hair. “And as you’re clearly neither dying nor dead, I’m going to get more firewood. Drink your fucking stew.”

Jaskier is still gaping at him when he snatches up the ax from the hearth and stomps out into the night, letting the door fall shut behind him with a resounding _thud._

Jaskier’s knees wobble again, and his hands are shaking hard enough that hot liquid splashes over the edge of his mug to scald his knuckles. He sits down. He drinks his fucking stew, and then he sets the mug aside and burrows miserably into his nest of blankets, staring blankly at the fire with eyes that grow heavier by the minute. Geralt doesn’t come back inside.

Eventually, he sleeps.

* * *

He wakes the next morning with a clear head and a foul temper. There’s still no sign of Geralt, although the presence of his battered leather pack and a nest of blankets on the far side of the hearth suggests that he can’t have gone far. Jaskier is more relieved than he wants to be at this evidence that he hasn’t—yet—been completely abandoned.

The situation is still repairable. He was quite out of his head last night. Geralt knows that. Jaskier hasn’t betrayed himself for anything other than a man as susceptible to enchantments as any other man.

Susceptible to enchantments, and lucky in his friends. Geralt could have killed him one-handed even once the frenzy overwhelmed him; he could have simply abandoned Jaskier to be burnt alive by the fever that would inevitably have followed. He did neither. Evidence, at least, that Jaskier’s continued survival is important enough to him to be worth a measure of indignity.

It’s not a romance that songs are made of, but it’s not nothing, either. Selfishly, Jaskier wishes he could remember it, although it's probably just as well that he can't. This whole mess is humiliating enough without having to remember Geralt gritting his teeth to get through the ordeal of fucking him.

Someone—well, Geralt, clearly—has left a bucket of water beside the banked fire to warm, along with a rag and a lump of hard soap. Jaskier feels filthy, gritty and awful with stale sweat and various other fluids best left unmentioned, but it still takes him several minutes to shove the blankets off and make his slow, shuffling way across the room.

He washes slowly, taking stock of his own body. There are no bruises or love-bites to evidence what happened last night; no soreness other than the fading fever ache. Geralt, it seems, was careful with him. Easy enough, Jaskier supposes bitterly, when you’re fucking someone for medicinal purposes rather than because you really want them.

He’s scrubbed the soap down to a nub before he finally feels clean, and though it’s not cold inside he’s shivering by the time he locates his pack and pulls on his clothes. Then he sinks down onto the narrow straw-tick mattress and puts his face in his hands.

As a general rule, he’s not much inclined to fits of self-indulgent melodrama unless they come in lyrical form, but there’s no way for him to make a song out of this. And Geralt, for all his forbearance last night, will probably kill him if he tries.

He pushes the heels of his hands into his eyes, relishing the ache if only for something else to focus on. There’s something gathering at the edges of his mind, the weight of memory starting to strain the fabric of his blissful ignorance. It’s not unlike the sensation of the morning after a drunken binge, the way images begin to percolate pitilessly in.

Apparently, he’s not going to be afforded the mercy of obliviousness after all. He remembers—

_—the beast rearing up, leathery black wings blocking out the dark sky as a stinging mist blew from its gullet to land on his skin, and then Geralt was there, his hair a flash of silver in the night followed by the deadlier silver of his blade, but Jaskier knew it was already too late. He could already feel the heat rolling through him, a deadly lassitude followed by prickling oversensitivity._

_A moment later, it seemed, he was carried over Geralt’s shoulder, hot and hazy with feverish lust, alternately clawing at his clothes and trying to press closer, rutting shamelessly against the solid body holding him as Geralt kicked the door open and hauled him into the dark and chilly cottage. He was speaking but Jaskier barely registered the words._

_He grabbed at Geralt the moment they were inside, catching indiscriminately at fistfuls of hair and clothing to drag him close. “Fuck, fuck,” he muttered, and then, “I’m sorry, Geralt, I’m sorry, you should leave. You should go.”_

_“Don’t be an idiot.” The steadiness of him, the warmth of his hands and the sturdy pillar of his body as Jaskier mouthed roughly at his throat and thrust against him and came inside his breeches just like that. He recognized distantly that tomorrow he’d be mortified, but in the moment it hardly seemed to matter. Not when Geralt was there, he was_ right there _and Jaskier was still so hard he ached with it and they were both wearing too many clothes, far too many—_

“Fuck,” Jaskier mumbles again into the hollow of his palms. It’s tomorrow, and he is indeed mortified. Perhaps he’ll just stay here forever. It’s a wonderful plan but for the fact that Geralt will eventually come back in, to get his possessions if for no other reason, and Jaskier will have to face him.

He could just lie. He’s not much of a liar, really, but he can certainly manage to pretend that he doesn’t remember sobbing _“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,”_ into Geralt’s shoulder even as his hands clawed at Geralt’s shirt and trousers, even as Geralt helped with the disrobing instead of breaking his fingers. That he didn’t stop until Geralt suddenly gripped his chin in one strong hand, snarled, “Stop _fucking_ apologizing,” and crushed their mouths together in a kiss.

Wait.

There was kissing. There was definitely kissing, more than just the one kiss that could—reasonably, theoretically—have been intended mostly to shut him up.

It’s all still just flashes, sensation and heat more than anything, but he definitely remembers kissing, and he remembers Geralt laid out beneath him, naked and aroused and drawing him down into a rough, heated kiss that definitely didn’t seem like the behavior of a man reluctantly enduring an unpleasant ordeal.

“Oh,” Jaskier says out loud to the empty room, and then he goes to find Geralt.

* * *

Despite his wilder fears, the witcher hasn’t gone far. He’s outside in the cool sunlight, brushing down Roach with a rough comb, murmuring soothing nonsense in his low, rumbling voice. He doesn’t stop or still or turn around when Jaskier comes up behind him, though he must hear him. It’s only when Jaskier clears his throat loudly that Geralt acknowledges his presence with a noncommittal grunt.

“So,” Jaskier says, hitching his hands into his pockets and rocking on his feet. He still feels sore. He wonders if Geralt does as well—he was _not_ gentle last night—then banishes the thought. Geralt has single-handedly felled monsters the size of this cabin. There’s no way that Jaskier’s puny hands and mouth and cock have done him any lasting damage. “I suppose I owe you a debt of gratitude. And an apology.”

“You don’t.”

“Oh really, is that so?”

“Hm.”

Jaskier eyes him. His hair is tied back haphazardly, and his faded and frayed black shirt strains against the muscular breadth of his shoulders. From this angle, all Jaskier can see of his face is the edge of his jaw and his cheekbone, but even that seems to be made up entirely of hard angles, drawn in sharp shadows by the late-fall sunlight. He’s completely familiar like this, and he seems like a different man entirely than the one Jaskier had in bed with him the night before.

Carefully, he says, “You said that the pori’s breath didn’t affect you.”

“It didn’t.”

Geralt is frugal with words on the best of days, but this is downright taciturn, even for him. Jaskier is used to using his own words as a fine blade to carve his way into something resembling a conversation with his witcher, but he’s exhausted and embarrassed and heartsick and more than a bit confused, so instead he says, “The thing is—the thing is, you kissed me. Several times, in fact.”

Geralt’s shoulders go tenser still, then slump as though burdened with a weight beyond their strength. “You remember.”

“Some, yes. Not everything. But I do remember you kissing me.”

There’s a long silence, and then Geralt sighs and picks up the comb again. Roach whickers softly as he starts on her flank and lips at his hair, entirely oblivious to the small melodrama playing out in her presence. “What the fuck do you want from me, Jaskier?”

Jaskier steps closer. Stalking the beast, he thinks, though been an age since he’s feared for his personal safety where Geralt is concerned. His heart is another matter, but as that’s already feeling more than a bit squashed there’s nothing for it but to continue. “I want an answer, that’s all. If it was all just, I don’t know— _medicinal_ —then I’ll offer you my heartfelt thanks and my sincere apologies and we can never speak of it again. But if you meant it—”

He’s close enough now to see Geralt close his eyes briefly, muscle knotting in his jaw. He looks like a man facing his execution—or, actually, he looks more upset than on any of the occasions where Jaskier has seen him _actually_ facing near-certain death—which is answer enough even before he bites out, “If I did, what then?”

“Well, that makes things quite a bit simpler,” Jaskier says, and blows out a messy breath before settling his hand on Geralt’s shoulder, feels the muscle there, the heat of his skin. Touching Geralt like this, without any immediate practical purpose, feels as dangerous now as it always does.

Geralt turns, finally, toward him. His hair is coming loose around his face, his light-colored eyes reflecting the sunlight with a draconic, inhuman gleam. He looks handsome, and tired, and extremely wary, as though Jaskier is something that could damage him. “Jaskier, what—”

“You’re an idiot,” Jaskier tells him gently, “shut up,” and then he leans up to kiss Geralt firmly on the mouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/glorious_spoon) or [Tumblr](glorious-spoon.tumblr.com)!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] lost souls and reverie](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24018676) by [Chantress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chantress/pseuds/Chantress)
  * [[podfic] lost souls and reverie](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24034051) by [Kess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kess/pseuds/Kess)




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